1. Field
The present disclosure relates to transmission of notifications, and more particularly, to methods and systems for identifying notifications in a notification system.
2. Background
Businesses and governmental entities, including federal and state officials, their agencies, municipalities and schools, are ever more reliant on communicating through the mass transmission of notifications to their staff, citizens and the family members of students to keep these constituencies apprized of important events, and sometimes of emergencies. For example, a school principal might need to send a message to the parent of every child that the school will be closed the next day due to some unforeseen event such as flooding, fire, or freezing conditions. Notifications with such messages might be sent by telephones, facsimiles, pagers, electronic mail (e-mail), and/or text messages. These notifications will typically vary in their degree of importance, in the number of recipients, in the duration of each message, and in the immediacy with which they must be sent.
However, there currently exists a growing problem as mass notification transmission systems become more prevalent. In particular, the notifications are not distinguishable from other network traffic received by the distributors (e.g., telecommunication providers) that maintain the network which delivers the notifications. Consequently, a notification in the interest of public safety intended for distribution to a large number of recipients, such as a telephone call from a government official, would appear the same as a telephone call or group of telephone calls from a telemarketer.
In such situations, delivery of some or all of the notifications may be blocked or delayed by the distributor because the distributor believes the notifications are inconsequential (e.g., a telemarketing telephone call), especially when the distributor's network is experiencing a significant traffic burden. It would be desirable to provide a system and method that allows a distributor to distinguish notifications from other network traffic.